Gravitational microlensing - Powerful combination of ray-shooting and parametric representation of caustics

Details Gravitational microlensing - Powerful combination of ray-shooting and parametric representation of caustics Gravitational microlensing - Powerful combination of ray-shooting and parametric representation of caustics

May 1992

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992a%26a...258..591w&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics (ISSN 0004-6361), vol. 258, no. 2, p. 591-599.

Statistics

Computation

31

Caustics (Optics), Dark Matter, Gravitational Lenses, Light Curve, Quasars, Ray Tracing, Computational Astrophysics, Line Of Sight, Probability Density Functions

Scientific paper

We present a combination of two very different methods for numerically calculating the effects of gravitational microlensing: the backward-ray-tracing that results in two-dimensional magnification patterns, and the parametric representation of caustic lines; they are in a way complementary to each other. The combination of these methods is much more powerful than the sum of its parts. It allows to determine the total magnification and the number of microimages as a function of source position. The mean number of microimages is calculated analytically and compared to the numerical results. The peaks in the lightcurves, as obtained from one-dimensional tracks through the magnification pattern, can now be divided into two groups: those which correspond to a source crossing a caustic, and those which are due to sources passing outside cusps. We determine the frequencies of those two types of events as a function of the surface mass density, and the probability distributions of their magnitudes. We find that for low surface mass density as many as 40 percent of all events in a lightcurve are not due to caustic crossings, but rather due to passings outside cusps.

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